It has become something of a joke to many conservatives to wish the worst for California due to the state’s left-leaning political structure. But what many “red” state inhabitants fail to recognize is that without Californian agriculture, the country would starve.
Fresh leafy greens, citrus fruits, almonds, avocados, rice, and so much more is grown in California, while the rest of the country – and especially America’s heartland – grows primarily genetically modified (GMO) corn, soybeans, and (hybridized) wheat.
Unless you want to be eating only high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and soybean oil next year, you had better hope that California figures out a way to get enough water to its farms, otherwise there will almost certainly be shortages of many of your favorite foods.
“I am so shocked and saddened by the comments from Midwesterners regarding California’s water shortage that I felt compelled to respond,” reads a submission from someone who reads the Desert Sun about this issue.
“Evidently, many in the Midwest are unaware that the bulk of California’s water is used for agriculture, not lawns, golf courses, or ‘thirsty people.’ The food grown and raised in California is sent all over the country, it doesn’t just stay here in California.”
Are Americans ready for nationwide food shortages?
While California’s water supply is certainly mismanaged, to say the least, the state is also facing a serious drought situation. There is only so much that can be done, in other words, to get what little water there is to everywhere it needs to be.
As we reported back in the spring, Sierra snowpack levels fell to the lowest levels in 72 years – snowpack that melts and provides water to farms.
Sure, California could stop dumping its freshwater into the ocean in order to save “endangered” fish species, or perhaps build more desalination plants. But would it be enough?
“Desalination of the ocean is one piece of the puzzle to provide water for the West Coast; however, it is also very expensive and would make any food grown with it unaffordable for the average American,” reads the rest of the reader submission to the Desert Sun.
“California could cease to grow food for the country and then we would have enough water for our own residents. Are Midwesterners ready for the nationwide food shortages that will ensue?”
To blame one side of the political aisle over the other for this mess is short-sighted. If anything, the entire country is being judged with California as the vehicle of that judgment.
In the coming months when grocery store shelves start running out of organic romaine lettuce and fresh nuts, Americans will wish they had prayed for the situation in California rather than mock it.
Perhaps the overwhelming pride of this country will face a serious wake-up call in humility once California, America’s food basket, is no longer able to deliver the things we have all learned to take for granted.
If California suffers, we all suffer. This is no laughing matter and it is not something at which to point and laugh as if it will have no impact on you.
Even if you live internationally, recognize the fact that California is a major global exporter of fresh food. Again, without the state’s agricultural system intact, most of what would remain at the grocery store would be corn and soy products as that is primarily what is grown throughout the Midwest.
“The coming dust bowl will once again be caused by ignorant farmers not learning regenerative farming; all they know is till and spray which creates serious soil problems,” wrote a commenter at Natural News about another serious problem with the way food is typically grown in the United States.
The latest news about the California drought situation can be found at FoodSupply.news.
Sources for this article include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Prayer or ridicule from the midwest or anywhere else won’t change anything about anything, anywhere. This article is a tangent; a meta discussion.
I can see the headlines now; “the midwest didn’t take advice to pray for miracle water to materialize in CA and now midwesterners are depending on their own local farmer’s markets for their produce….”.
I said years ago if / when the drought in CA got bad enough. The rural area will take it in the _____ . Politics over reason . More people per sq. mile in the cities . YOu want to get reelected. You make sure the women in the city can still use a flush toilet.